While online activities such as communication, presentation of content, and search may be broadly universal, actually doing anything with the information we find and share may require identification and iterative access corresponding to multiple different internal ‘silos’ of online services. Shopping for particular items, booking a complex trip, or scheduling events with multiple participants may require a great deal of user time and considerable duplication of effort and input. There may also be tasks that cannot be completed online, but the outcome of which must be integrated with our online activities.
A next step in the development of the online world may include the development of services capable of accessing multiple other services against specific requests of arbitrary complexity, then presenting the results to the originator of the request. Such services thereby create a universal means of carrying out complex tasks. The monolithic development and support of such universal services would however consume exponentially rising levels of resources making them fundamentally uneconomical.